


On the Waterfront (Cape Town)

by NoID (Mentor)



Series: The Ron/Pansy Division [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27391393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mentor/pseuds/NoID
Summary: “Well if it isn’t Ronald Weasley.”
Relationships: Pansy Parkinson/Ron Weasley
Series: The Ron/Pansy Division [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2002309
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	1. a.

“Well if it isn’t Ronald Weasley.”

Ron groans quietly. One hemisphere and two times zones away, and he still can’t escape England.

“I heard you were dead.”

“And who told you that?” He leans back in his chair to squint up at her, the index finger and thumb of his right hand pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Oh, you know, word does get around so quickly these days. If it’s any consolation, you went out fighting.”

“Yeah?”

“Mmm. With the medics, while they tried to stop you from stabbing yourself. Or your mother, when she tried to make you eat.”

“They’re saying I killed myself?”

“Of course. You were held prisoner for, what was it, 10 months?”

“15.”

“Oh dear. Well after 15 months as a Death Eater prisoner, is there anything to do but kill yourself?”

“Well obviously, if I’m still alive.”

“Much to my surprise, I assure you. May I sit? I’m not intruding am I?”

She didn’t sound like she particularly cared.

Ron shrugged.

“Lovely.” She slides easily into the seat opposite, discarding a wide-brimmed Panama and smiling in a manner he supposed she considered pleasant. Predatory was probably closer to the mark. Something tells him she would have sat whether he wanted her to or not. “So.”

“So.”

“You’re a long way from home.” She picks idly through the shrimp on his plate before selecting one that apparently fits some unknown but terribly particular specifications. He ignores her.

“I suppose.”

“It’s terribly beautiful out here though. Not quite a place men would come to die, in my estimation.” She eyed him expectantly. He supposes he should say something. She’s been here for all of five minutes, picking through his lunch and drinking his fucking wine and he hasn’t snapped, cursed, or tried to hit her. Which must have seemed strange.

He shrugged.

She waves a waiter over and efficiently orders two main courses, even though he swears he never once saw her touch the menu. She rambles on to the waiter in a somewhat irritating mix of English and Afrikaans. He managed to catch something about a side of peri peri before realizing that, knowing her, he would be expected to pay for any and every word that came out of her big, red mouth. 

“You didn’t just order two bottles of wine.”

It wasn’t a question or an accusation or a whiny exclamation. She recognized it as such.

“Well, yes. One white and one red. They say variety’s the spice of life you know.”

He looks at her, long and steady. The sort of look that takes a floppy haired underachiever from mental instability to respected war General. From liability to necessity. He doesn’t even remember when it started, but he does it and people respond. 

Even haughty little bitches like Pansy Parkinson. Although not without a fight.

“Oh honestly Weasley, in the name of good taste.” She sounds positively scandalized at not having her way.

“What’s good taste got to do with anything?”

“You mean besides the obvious fact that you have none?”

He snorted. “Yeah, besides that.” He nods at the waiter.

“We’ll have just the red thanks.”

“I prefer white.”

“Yeah well I fucking hate it.”


	2. b.

If he had ever gotten around to fucking Hermione he probably would have compared the two. Except Hermione would never have called it fucking, and it had taken so much effort to get a kiss out of her he’d bet that even if he had stayed, if they had been together all these 4 years he’s been away, it would have taken months to get her skirt up. He imagines she would have been prudish. What do dentists teach their children about sex? She probably would squirm and complain then roll over and stare at the wall when it was done. She probably wouldn’t bite him like Pansy had just done. Her well defined moral code would probably strongly object to the thought of going down on him. She probably wouldn’t let him fuck her bent over the bathtub, her fingers digging so hard into the side as to threaten to crack the porcelain under her fingers. She probably wouldn’t even call it fucking, so they probably would never have done it.

It’s funny he should think of her now. He hasn’t so much as thought her name in years. But it almost feels natural for her voice and her face to filter through his mind while his hand slips between Pansy’s thighs. It feels natural to think of the feel of her hair as he pulls on Pansy’s. Remember the way she sat and frowned and the first day he met her while Pansy curls into him, her feet rubbing up his calf and her breath warming his neck. 

It’s not that he compares them. There’s nothing to compare, really. They’re both female, and he’s sure they’re the same age and all, but that’s about where the similarity ends. There’re many things he doesn’t remember about Hermione, each one matched by one thing he learns about Pansy every day. Pansy hates chocolate, red wine and sandals. She takes two baths a day and gets her hair done on Fridays. There’s a birthmark on the small of her back that she pretends doesn’t exist. She talks in her sleep, her feet are extremely small, and nothing makes her angrier than a wet bathroom floor. He learned that one the hard way.

She’s smart like Hermione though. Not book smart (she doesn’t much care for anything that isn’t fiction, although he’s convinced she’s read Hogwarts: A History about as many times as Hermione has, except she treats it with little awe and quite a bit of disdain), but life smart. This is funny because she’s the daughter of Anthony Parkinson, born in the luxury of her own estate, raised with everything she could ever want, and spoiled absolutely rotten. What could she possibly know about life? Girls like her didn’t know what it was like to go hungry for more than an hour. Hell, they didn’t even know how to live without 5 people and an army of house elves at their beck and call; didn’t understand that some people couldn’t buy any little thing on the slightest whim; didn’t know what it was like to be without. Her naiveté was charming at times, the way she always expected things to work out was almost optimistic. She wasn’t unrealistic per se, because she was a Slytherin after all. Ron supposes if there’s one thing Slytherins knew, it was how to deal with hate. She’s very much aware that she’s hated for a myriad of reasons – her name, her money, her success – but to her it doesn’t mean defeat. It never means she can’t get what she wants or say what she feels.


	3. c.

They’ve been sleeping together for two weeks before Ron bothers to ask.

“So why are you here?”

She turns from her mirror to stare at him, as if assessing whether or not he’s officially lost his mind. She’s always in front of that mirror, always getting ready to go wherever the hell she goes all the time. Even when they use his room she camps in front of the dressing table from the minute she rolls out of bed to the second he forcibly evicts her, or at least until she deigns it necessary to go pick up some clothes. It’s all well and good really, because that mirror compliments her more than he ever will.

“Here in the country. What’re you doing all the way out here?”

“Oh.” She turned back to the mirror and picked up her hairbrush. What it was doing there was beyond him, because he could have sworn it was in his bathroom last night. She had a way of randomly foisting her junk off on him. His wardrobe was overflowing with miniskirts and shoes that were pretty enough, but definitely not his. He had to wade through her 50 million bottles of shampoo and body wash and extra strength conditioner just to get to the sink every morning. Her brushstrokes were long and precise, and Ron could swear he had heard her quietly counting to herself on more than one occasion.

“Family business.”

Ron grunts and wanders into the bathroom. He’s sure she doesn’t want to tell him any more, and doubly sure he probably doesn’t really care. When he crawls back into bed and pulls the covers over his head she’s still brushing her hair.

“I hope you washed your hands.”

“If I say yes will you put that bloody thing down and come here?”

She sighs. “Ron it’s already noon.”

“So?”

Pansy lays the brush down with a soft *click* and stands up.

“You can’t spend the whole afternoon in bed.”

“Do you have somewhere to be?”

“No.”

“Then come here.”

He rolls onto his back and the sheet slips down to his waist, her eyes following its trail.

“I’m not going to waste the whole day laying around doing nothing.”

“Who said anything about doing nothing?”

Her hands are on her hips now, a sure sign she intents to fight this. He sighs.

“Parkinson…”

“Is this what you do all day?” she asks, and Merlin is all he can think. Merlin, she’s not going to start bloody nagging.

“I mean, is this what you spend all your time doing? I go out and what, you just lay around until I come by again? You do absolutely nothing do you?”

“I like to think I’m on holiday and therefore am at liberty to do anything I bloody well please. Including doing absolutely nothing.”

“People on holiday go out! They do things, they see things. You haven’t left this hotel in weeks Weasley. You’re practically growing mould.”

She’s getting angry, and for the life of him he can’t understand why. There’s something slightly bothersome in the knowledge that he recognizes her anger for what it is. When Pansy Parkinson is angry she doesn’t move. She stands perfectly still and looks directly into his eyes. When she gets very, very angry she cocks her hips and her weight rests on one side, her chin goes up and she manages to look down on him even though he’s quite a bit taller than she, and her mouth hangs slightly open in an offended, vaguely disgusted pout. It’s a good thing he’s halfway across the room because soon after that she’d slap him at least once, and things tended to deteriorate after that point. It bothers him because it’s so familiar, as though it were a constant in his life. But then, she gets angry with him quite a lot so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that he knows the signs. She really has an amazingly bad temper.

“Are we going to fight?” he asks. Calmly, softly, which is new for him and manages to throw her off balance for a little bit.

“What?”

“Are we going to fight?” He swings his feet over the edge and sits up, reaching idly for his shorts. “Because if we are, I’m leaving.”

One of his shoes is missing, which really isn’t a big deal because his room is just down the hall and Pansy will eventually find it and attempt to throw it at his head at some point so it’s not like he’ll never see it again. 

“We wouldn’t be fighting if you weren’t such a –“

“Oh stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“Being such a fucking woman.”

She inhales sharply and takes a faltering step back.

Round fucking one, Ron thinks as he brushes past her and slams the door on his way out.

She doesn’t speak to him for three days, and eventually he’s bored, and agitated, enough to go looking for her. He spends a good twenty minutes knocking at her door, knowing full well that she’s probably standing right up against it smiling her smug little smile and calculating just how long she’ll have to leave him out there for him to lose his temper and cause a scene.

He doesn’t last an hour.


	4. d.

Ron hates rich people. He hates their big, ugly houses and their stupidly expensive clothes. He hates the way they talk, the way they look at other people, even the way they smell. All flowery and sharp, as though they spent the entire afternoon soaking in expensive but bad perfume. Which they probably did, because they were rich and rich people probably did things like that. He hates the things they eat, like those horrible little crackers with bits of cheese and salmon – he hates salmon – on them. They could never be happy with normal food, normal clothes, normal English even. Every noun needed 3 adjectives and if a word was less than ten letters long it just wasn’t good enough. In the past two weeks he’s had more conversations in Latin than he ever thought he’d have in a lifetime. They’d talk as if they didn’t expect him to understand a word of what they were saying. He was just some ruffian Pansy picked up somewhere to upset her grandmother after all, no one expected him to be terribly educated. When he joined their conversations, out of boredom or pride or sick curiosity, they would laugh their fake little laughs to cover their surprise and immediately proclaim him ‘one of them’. Somehow it just made him hate them more.

But most of all he hated their parties. He wasn’t even sure he could call them parties. Theatrical productions maybe. Carnivals perhaps. They’re nothing like the parties he used to go to before the war. Gryffindor parties were loud and usually ended in a dog pile on the rug in front of the fire, but they were also small and personal. He’d been to a couple of parties at Fred & George’s apartment, and those had always been beyond mad (for months he had lived in fear of having his mother find out), but never quite like this.

This? This was ridiculous.

“Why do you even go to these things?”

“What do you mean? Don’t wear that tie, it’s hideous.”

“You bought it.” And she had done. He’d taken one look at it (and just about everything else she had bought that day), immediately proclaimed them all despicable (but probably in harsher terms; it’d been a particularly bad day), and earned himself a glare, three slaps, and no sex for 30 some hours.

“No I didn’t.”

“Last Wednesday. With that ugly sweater and those disgusting brown shoes. I think you were going for some sort of look. Flubberworm chic, maybe.”

She rolls her eyes and turns back to her beloved mirror. “You know, you’re not all that humorous Weasley.”

“Yeah I get that all the time. Well then your royal bloody highness, what am I supposed to wear now?”

“What, your mother never taught you to dress yourself?”

“She did that, but she never threatened me bodily harm if I didn’t wear exactly what she set out for me. And she certainly never changed her mind about it 15 minutes before we walked out the door. But then, she was a good one my mum. Don’t find women like that too often these days, do you?”

“If you’re quite done insulting my virtue you can put this on.” She holds up a white shirt and a blue striped tie. He takes them and nonchalantly throws them on the bed.

“You better hope that shirt doesn’t get wrinkled you ill mannered pauper!” She shouts as she hops toward the bathroom, one pump halfway on her right foot while the other lay somewhere under the bed.

“I know how to get rid of wrinkles.”

“Really. You went through 7 years of school covered in them.”

“And how would you know? You used to watch me, did you?”

“Oh yes. All the time.”

“I bet you were secretly in love with me.”

“How could I possibly have resisted? All those freckles, those ratty old clothes, that insufferable Granger hanging all over you. My heart belonged only to you, beloved.”

“Yeah, well you didn’t seem to mind all those freckles last night.”

Her lips taste like strawberry wine, as cliché as all that sounds, and when they part he inhales softly and concentrates on the feel of her tongue; the slide of his tongue against her teeth; the feel of her nails digging into the back of his neck.

“You’ll mess up my lipstick,” she whispers against his cheek “and we’ve only got 10 minutes. You’re not even dressed.”

She pulls his arms from around her waist, giggles when he tries to reach for her again (tomorrow she’ll deny she’s ever giggled in her life) and disappears into the bathroom.

Ron’s convinced the majority of their sex life is based purely on his frustration. 

“Why do we have to go to this stupid party? You and your grandmother don’t even get along. You’ll just end up arguing with her and then we’ll have to leave after I’ve spent 2 hours having 12 different conversations about Cousin Odette’s torrid affair with the groundskeeper. In Latin.” He pulled at the knot of his tie.

“Are you listening to me?”

“No.”

“I fucking hate your cousin Odette. I hate all your cousins, actually.”

“Yes well so do I. And I certainly do get on with my grandmother. We’re just having a bit of a disagreement at the moment.”

“In my family a disagreement means you don’t talk to someone for a few days.”

“What’s your point?”

“The last time the two of you fought we had yellow fever for three days.”

“Hmm. She does overreact a bit sometimes. Old age.”

“She fucking smote us. With a pestilence. What kind of disagreement is that?”

"And didn't you deserve it."


End file.
